Following Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” Jim Jarmusch’s new film, “Only Lovers Left Alive,” is the second-most-intensely curated movie of the season, starting with its first images, in which a galaxy of stars morphs into the spinning, gleaming groove of a vintage rock 45 on a turntable. The rest of the movie only deepens the mystical sense of the cosmos condensed into the well-chosen work of art—and the vintage fetish object that embodies it. The first dramatic scene is a guitar lover’s wet dream, with the reclusive, stringy-haired musician Adam (Tom Hiddleston) receiving from his sycophantic young connection, Ian (Anton Yelchin), a trove of seductively named and specifically dated collector’s items (a 1966 Hagstrom, a Gretsch Chet Atkins, and an “early-sixties Silvertone,” among others). This may be the most rockist movie ever made.
No less than Anderson’s latest film, “Only Lovers” makes its director’s sense of style its subject. Jarmusch’s protagonists, Adam and Eve (Tilda Swinton), are a musician and his helpmeet/muse, respectively—and they’re also vampires, hundreds of years old, the secret agents of artistic and intellectual achievement throughout history. Living apart at first—Adam is holed up in a house in a desolate part of a city of the dead, Detroit, while Eve inhabits Tangier in the frequent company of a close elderly friend, Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). He is the Christopher Marlowe of history, a member of the vampire subset of a hidden historical avant-garde (as well as, so to speak, a leading Shakespearean).
But Eve and Adam miss each other—they Skype, Eve using her iPhone and Adam hooking his computer up to an early-generation wood-cabinet color TV—and, under the name Eve Fibonacci, she flies to Detroit so that the couple can reunite. It’s a night flight, of course: as vampires, the couple can’t see the light of day. The movie takes place entirely after dark, with the Detroit house sealed up against sunshine and maintained both as a music studio, filled with all sorts of classic musical instruments and audio gear (analogue, of course—Adam records himself on a reel-to-reel), and as a private Hall of Fame, featuring portraits of Franz Kafka, Billie Holiday, Mark Twain, Thelonious Monk, and other artistic kinfolk. Some of the riffy script’s artistic name-dropping includes Byron and Mary Wollstonecraft, Eddie Cochran and Schubert, Einstein and Tesla, and the couple makes other airline reservations under the names of Stephen Dedalus and Daisy Buchanan. Eve is a connoisseur as well, an aesthete who can discern the exact age of an object by touching it.
They’re also, in effect, blood addicts—their first move, upon reaching a new destination, is to locate their connection. Adam, disguised as a doctor (his badge sometimes reads “Dr. Faust,” sometimes “Dr. Caligari”), gets his canisters of “O Negativo” at a local hospital from another doctor (Jeffrey Wright), who spots Adam’s stethoscope as vintage. And, when the source of blood (about which they’re picky, preferring the French stuff) dries up, they’re left with no choice but, in true vampire style, to turn to the necks of people.
For the couple, the world’s Manichean division is between vampires (the connoisseurs and the creators) and zombies (everyone else—who have what Adam calls “fear of their fucking imagination”), a metaphysical twist on the hip and the square, but one that Jarmusch takes seriously. His vampiric artists repudiate fame (the realm of zombies), and, rather, get their work “out there” in secret, using the names and reputations of the famous. The movie, with its vehemently anti-pop orientation, sets up a hidden cultural aristocracy that burrows, termite-like, through the history of art to deliver the highest treasures surreptitiously, communicating secretly with the other sanguinary hipsters while satisfying the vulgar zombie clamor. There’s even a scene featuring a performance by the Lebanese singer Yasmine Hamdan, which the couple greatly enjoys. Eve suggests that she’ll become famous someday, and Adam responds, “She’s way too good for that.”
The power, the delight, and the pitfall of “Only Lovers Left Alive” is its creation of a grand artistic mythology in which Jarmusch himself assumes his place. The script is so clever that it nearly puts over a sensibility that seems petrified in nostalgia and closed in among its personal archives. In Anderson’s film, the images, the editing, the soundtrack, and the dialogue match and heighten the cultivated style and exacting connoisseurship on which the story and its protagonist run. By contrast, Jarmusch’s private museum no longer seems to involve movies. His artistic pantheon doesn’t reach from “Hamlet” to the history of cinema; it stops short of it. There’s neither a cinematic archivism that nourishes the movie nor a cinematic invention to sustain the emotional power of its countercultural gospel.
Jarmusch offers a notion about the connection between art and evil, between creation and depredation. Vampires, after all, don’t always play nice—and, as they feed their needs, they also create new vampires, expanding the audience of the hip. But the missing link is money; the life that Adam and Eve sustain is a well-financed one. Adam throws around wads of cash for his vintage instruments, the lovers need cash to feed their blood habit, and they travel easily on credit cards, yet the movie never comes to terms with the practicalities by which an artist of Adam’s stature can live the desired lifestyle while repudiating the terms by which most artists have to make a living—namely, by appealing to the zombie masses.
What’s missing from “Only Lovers Left Alive” is, above all, the documentary element—the sense of creation taking place on the wing. It is, in effect, a movie written to be performed by Patti Smith and Richard Hell, and it suffers from the precision and the finesse of its cast, from the smooth craft of its production. There’s a fierce, raw, troubling, self-lacerating movie looking to break out of its ultimately self-justifying bubble—even though the movie’s ideas about aesthetics are so vibrant and catchy that saying so makes me feel like a zombie of a critic.
Photograph by Sandro Kopp/Sony Pictures Classics.
